All the Bright Places Analysis

Welcome to Bartlett High School, where it seems like everyone has an awful secret, tragedy…or both. Violet tells us:Our town is small but our school is large. We have over two thousand students b...

Throughout the book, we switch back and forth between Finch's and Violet's perspectives. Each chapter is helpfully titled "Finch" or "Violet" so we know who's saying what, but their voices are diff...

Published in 2015, All the Bright Places is definitely not a Modernist work. Still, it draws heavily on writers from that era. From the epigraph to the final sentence, the author quotes Ernest Hemi...

When we meet Theodore Finch, he's standing outside a six-story window, contemplating suicide. At the end of the book, he follows through. In between, he thinks about killing himself almost constant...

While Finch and Violet have real depth, it's hard to ignore the degree to which the author relies on cliché to build her secondary characters. It's hard to say which is more cheesy: Amanda, the pe...

The title references the Dr. Seuss classic, Oh, the Places You'll Go!…aka the gift high school and college graduates have received since the beginning of time (or at least since 1990). It's a com...

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. —Ernest HemingwayIn All the Bright Places, Finch and Violet are constantly referring to famous writers who killed t...

In the final chapter, Violet goes swimming by herself in the Blue Hole. This is where she went swimming with Finch during one of their wanderings, and also the place where he took his own life. In...

Finch and Violet are dealing with complex problems, including grief and mental illness. Fortunately for us, they're really good at explaining those uber-difficult feelings. They also have a sense o...

Boy Meets Girl…On a LedgeOne rainy morning, two high school seniors find each other standing outside a window at the top of a tower. Meet Violet and Finch, who are each, for their own reasons, th...

All of the "wanders" in the book are real places in Indiana except for one—the bookmobile park. The author toured all of them, but not until after she had written the book. (Source)Jennifer Niven...

When it comes to Finch and Violet's sex life, we don't get a ton of deets. This is about as explicit as it gets when it comes to those two: For a while I forget we're on the floor of a closet becau...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (2.48)William Shakespeare, Macbeth (3.60)The Brontë sisters (5.60)Cesare Pavese (poet) (6.2)Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (7.4)J.D. Salinger, Catcher in t...